Swiss vs. UK approach to major tranport projects
freewheeling.info
freewheeling.info
There are no adults in the room saying you know what, the value to life and society and the good that could be done with £100M of public money is worth more than the unproven possibility of a bat being injured.
One of the good things and assets of this country is our strong legal system and the comparative accessibility of justice, compared to many other places in the world. But this also gets used by people with an axe to grind to frustrate big public projects.
That someone is Natural England, who is tasked, by law, with enforcing laws that protect wildlife and the environment and needs to sign off on disruptive work:
> A spokesperson for HS2 Ltd said "multiple options" had been considered, including green bridges and restoring habitats, to "comply with laws protecting vulnerable species".
> It said through "extensive engagement" with Natural England, "a covered structure was designed".
* https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9wryxyljglo
If you don't like it change the law so that the environment/wildlife isn't protected, or these kinds of sign offs are not requirement, or can be overrided in the enacting legislation of infrastructure projects.
Anyway, I'm not in UK so I don't care. Good luck.
We probably won't agree with each other, though. We definitely have different definition of "care".
Unfortunately, for those laws to be effective, they have to be strong enough to beat the various legal shenanigans / loopholes which can be used by developers to effortlessly leapfrog them.
Finally, if the laws are strong enough, they might be effortlessly wielded to prevent even reasonable developments from occurring.
The law lands somewhere in the middle and I think there are always people at either extreme trying to take advantage.
The fact that there is a law saying this drag must be applied does not make it right. I'm fully aware we need to protect natural species, not create fire risks, etc, etc, but the idea that every project must incur cost to prove up front that it is complete is an asinine drag on everything, especially seeing as like 99.9% of projects are effectively compliant from the get go and the bulk of the time wasting consists of circulating correspondance and nit picking to this effect.
That's basically the whole point of a representative government, no?
That attitude is the problem. They're supposed to represent you (or some approximation thereof) not tell you what to think. It's in the f-ing name.
The laws exist because we, collectively, thought they were a good idea. They can be changed if/when we change our minds.
For this specific thing, the drag while proving lack of damage is the point. Once the road/rail/bridge/whatever is built, it's often too late to simply say "oops". That, plus industry has a well deserved reputation for ignoring the environment when it becomes inconvenient.
Some folks don't have morals and so legislation is enacted to act as a floor for bad behaviour.
There is currently a bill going through Parliament to simplify this stuff - https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3946 - though not going so far as to remove all protections.
To be clear, the benefits to high speed transit are probably worth destroying some habitats, and we need to weigh the social and economic benefits of allowing some level of environmental disruption. Progress comes at a cost. We should be clear about what that cost is.
If the best you could think of is that "a" bat might "possibly" get injured it's a dramatic understatement of the kind of environmental threats they face. And you don't have to be anything more than a bit of a news junkie to know that.
Do you have a sense of how to approach the question of “cost” for this particular bat case?
When destroying an entire habitat (let’s assume we can define the boundaries of that habitat and it is mostly unique), do you have a sense of how to compute the cost given the multitude of species, geographical feedback loops, etc.?
It may seem like an improvement to say that a rail project has to be careful about bats. But left unsaid is that the highway that already exists and competes with rail was never asked to perform such an analysis, and it's likely someone could adding lanes to that highway with much less stringent requirements.
So what is ostensibly environmental law, really ends up being a status quo law - if the status quo is bad for the environment, the law perpetuates it. The headline is about bats and trains, but everything from insects, to animals to people are killed right now - every day - on highways and no one bats an eye.
We do this for other stuff - for example, the NHS in the UK has a system called QALYs (Quality Adjusted Life Years) which represent how much a particular treatment will extend someone's life, adjusted by the quality of that life. You can then calculate a cost per QALY for a new treatment, and make a decision about what costs are worthwhile for the NHS to pay for, and what aren't.
Something like that that could apply to planning permission decisions would be very useful for national infrastructure projects.
A notorious case is the snail darter, invented to block construction of the Tellico Dam in Tennessee. It was the first legal test of the US Endangered Species Act and it was fraudulent [1]. This raises huge questions about how the Endangered Species Act is actually being used, if the very first test case was about a species that scientists now think doesn't really exist as a separate thing at all.
Another case is the California Gnatcatcher, which is not an endangered kind of bird, but green NIMBYs argued under the ESA that the coastal California Gnatcatcher was a different species that would be endangered by construction. They have successfully kept the "coastal" variant of the bird listed as an endangered species for decades, which regularly blocks or slows down construction in CA.
They love this game! After all, what defines a species? It's a vague concept and the taxonomists who decide whether something is a new species are academics, who are all on the far left. Nothing stops them publishing a paper that concludes the animals next to any planned project are unique and special snowflakes that must be protected, purely because they just want to block progress.
To put the scale of this problem in perspective, last year taxonomists "discovered" 260 new species of freshwater fish alone [2]. They claim that hundreds of unique kinds of fish escaped notice for centuries, that this happens every year, and each one of those kinds of fish is critical to preserve. Is this plausible?
[1] https://yibs.yale.edu/news/fish-center-key-conservation-figh...
[2] https://fishkeepingnews.com/2025/03/04/260-new-freshwater-fi...
I don't disagree with the premise that environmental laws are being abused by people with ancillary agendas, but arguably humans have been underestimating the complexity of ecological systems for generations, incorrectly assuming that we understand everything well enough to manage and control our impacts without long tail side effects.
It may well be plausible that there are many hundreds of undiscovered fish species out there, and that interfering with any subset of them could cascade into other consequences. We've certainly been learning a lot about the impacts of dams on fisheries in recent years—changes made centuries ago that had profound long term effects on our food supply, to take a tangible example.
That's not what happened, and your own links fail to support your narrative. It was genuinely believed - before the passing of the act - that the recently-discovered snail darter was a distinct species. It is still disputed whether it's a distinct species, unique sub-species, distinct population segment, or none of the above. The first three of these would still afford it protections under the Endangered Species Act.
The outcome here was the dam was blocked despite being nearly fully constructed, the decision was objected to by the developers who said it was nonsense, the dam builders were correct and the taxonomists were wrong. 100% bad outcome: everyone loses.
Unfortunately it's what you'd expect from a system that allows people who have no incentive to say yes overrule anything they don't like, because if later it's revealed they were wrong they can just say "whoopsie, well who is really to say what is true anyway, times change etc". There's no accountability.
You're certainly happy to throw about assumptions.
> The outcome here was the dam was blocked
It was slowed but not "blocked". The dam exists!
> the taxonomists were wrong
Still in dispute.
> There's no accountability.
Academic reputation is a surprisingly strong form of accountability, and even more so in the 1970's.
It's also kind of funny to me that "all academics are far left". I'd love to hear more about that.
Regarding what is critical to preserve, I don't know. Maybe some laws should be changed or amended.
[1]: https://yibs.yale.edu/news/fish-center-key-conservation-figh...
https://heterodoxacademy.org/blog/professors-moved-left-but-...
That's an average of self reported views, in a culture where everyone tells each other they're totally moderate and neutral. The problem is less serious in engineering subjects. In non-engineering subjects, far leftism is pretty much homogenous.
Actually delivering smaller projects at a rapid pace on an understood roadmap as advocated by the article is very different to delivering a big flashy project which delivers nothing until it's all delivered.
Its more like how the UKs motorway network was built. In 1963 the M6 J13-15 opened. At that time there was nothing north or south of it, but it started delivering benefits immediately. The following year J15 to Preston opened, anyone heading south was still dumped onto traditional roads though, but again massive benefits. The cross country link from Birmingham to the M1 didn't open until 1971, but by then people had had a decade of benefiting from both motorways. It also followed a different route, the M45 for example fell by the roadside as requirements changed, that's fine - requirements will change. Build towards a vision, but make it usable faster and quicker.
Of course software people no longer like "Agile"
It's a distraction technique as old as the hills, and implies the blame for the missing 100b is because of bat boxes, while others run off with the remaining 99b.
"There is no available capacity without significantly impacting performance and causing a reduction in timetable resilience due to the resulting requirement for successive services to run on minimum headway"
https://www.orr.gov.uk/sites/default/files/om/wcml-capacity-...
That is an issue with many projects in the US. Reasonable and well-intentioned environmental regulations are created, but then used as political cudgels in bad faith to derail projects for NIMBY or other reasons of self interest.
It’s not an easy problem to solve.
Course have subsequently expanded it's purview beyond parody, such that a law that was written with the goal of preventing contaminated rivers from catching fire now requires a housing developer to study the potential "environmental impact" college students getting a bit too noisy would have on the surrounding neighborhood.
Everyone knows it's stupid but they're doing it anyway.
The problem is that legislation and rules and official policy and precedents have added up and added up over the years to the point where nobody can say "screw this, we're not studying your stupid bats, we're building the tunnel, come back if you think the bats have been negatively affected".
And the whole thing top to bottom in every area is like this and it forces out or kills the ambition of and subjugates anyone who tries to to better. And even if those people did magically appear they would be facing a system that has spent generations getting stacked with people who are opposed to doing things and taking responsibility (because everyone else washes out or converts). It's a bad system and it naturally fills itself with bad people.
And this isn't news to anyone who's had to interface with government in a capacity other than the low common denominator consumer stuff (permits for basic stuff, licenses of various types) that is generally polished less those people start questioning the utility of these organizations knows this.
> There are no adults in the room saying you know what, the value to life and society and the good that could be done with £100M of public money is worth more than the unproven possibility of a bat being injured.
Remember if these adults were in the room, the political cohort angry about the bat tunnel wouldn't have been able to stop low-traffic neighbourhood schemes, cycle paths, air-quality regulations, Manchester's congestion charge, etc.
It's even worse than it first appears. There's no evidence that the trains will have any impact on the bats AND there's equally scant evidence that a tunnel will protect the bats from this entirely theoretical harm.
As someone who lives near a train line with people, pets and wildlife all seeming unbothered by the train line, I'm not sure it's really necessary.
>The project required more than 8,000 permits, each needing surveys, consultation and legal sign-off.
So you can build things like I did: https://www.stationdisplay.com/
Recently also all the Swiss Weather data has been opened and you can create anything you want with it (no commercial restrictions)
£1.2bn spent without even a shovel of dirt being removed. [1] Instead they have spent money on shite like this [2] (which may be admirable in themselves, but bribes to shut local communities and charities up shouldn't be part of the project).
[1] https://www.kentonline.co.uk/gravesend/news/1-2bn-spent-on-l...
[2] https://nationalhighways.co.uk/our-roads/lower-thames-crossi...
Otherwise it's
1) Don't build national infrastructure
2) Ignore local opposition
Half a million at most out of 1.2 billion.
> To date, 55 projects have been awarded grants of up to £10,000
Running community benefit projects as mitigation for other harms does make some sense when the cost of an engineering solution is much higher.
I have seen the current Labour government start to override councils putting up fusses, too early to see if it makes any meaningful effect though.
I watched this video from TLDR last year and found it easy to understand https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYPFlDGQah4
If you're gonna be anti-progress, fine, but it should cost you, not others
Having lived in one that went through a phase of that (Sri Lanka) it strikes me that this is yet another way in which the UK is becoming more like Sri Lanka (all bad ways - not the things that are good about the latter). I see it in education too, for example.
Even when it doesn't work, it still often works better than in neighboring countries ;)
The article does agree that Switzerland wouldn't have built HS2 to begin with, and the point about continuous development over occasional megaprojects is a good one. But it goes off the rails when it starts saying like
"They'd have identified core intercity links that are far too slow: typically not to/from London, but some of the second-tier city connections that are extraordinarily slow:"
The UK doesn't need these things. What it needs is much more capacity in and out of the center of London. That's where people actually need to go and go fast. The author seems to think that British transport planners are inexplicably stupid but the depressing reality of British transport is that it's dominated by the problem of moving people in and out of the center of London at peak times. Economically nothing else generates a return on investment and there's nothing the planners can do about that. Swiss planners would reach the same conclusion.
Given that there's already a lot of physical rail going in and out, and there's no good way to add more or expand stations due to the insanely high value of the land around them, that means increasing speeds on existing lines or massive tunnelling projects. Hence, Crossrail and High Speed Rail 2.
Switzerland has a unique solution to this problem of people wanting to work in city centers. It just ignores it! Zurich is one of the most expensive cities in the world to live in, and sometimes literally the most expensive, whilst also having a big living space problem. It got that way because the Swiss refuse to do any of the following:
- Increase urban density.
- Make trains fast.
- Build more parking.
- Allow a free housing market so workers can move in. (Zurich is run by socialists who buy up tons of housing to stop "rich" people from renting it, which then makes what little remains even more expensive for everyone else).
This strategy kills the cities and makes life worse for the people who actually generate the economic value, who find their high salaries barely stretch to even a student-sized apartment and for whom an 11km commute takes 30 minutes.
I was genuinely surprised last summer, when a locomotive standing still at a station spontaneously burst into flames, during the busiest commuting period. Had I not been WFH that day, it would have been a major inconvenience, as the whole station closed down for a couple of hours... I thought that this kind of experience was reserved for Eastern Europeans, but the Swiss proudly followed suit.
https://www.blick.ch/schweiz/zuerich/feuer-in-zuerich-zug-am...
Being casually racist on the other hand is a time-honored pan-European tradition, proudly upheld by Swiss.
NIMBYs and other special interest groups are usually non-majority, but used to getting their way over the wish (or, more often, tired indifference) of the majority, which the Swiss system makes a bit harder.
However, I think the bigger cultural norm at play here is that public infrastructure is very cherished. We publicly own (at least 51% of each of) our energy companies, public transport system, telecommunications system etc. Long term planning and investment is also ingrained into our culture.
At our current pace a public toilet will soon qualify as a megaproject.
The agile way. You end up getting nothing you really wanted done but everything is on time vs the method where you get everything you want at some unknown point in time.
What if it was done waterfall style where you put in as much in the time frame and released at random marketing moments.
Heres a couple reactions based on the Swiss point of view.
> keeps the supply chain warm
Yes! And the human resources pool. And a constant supply of construction projects means every industry touched by them can keep a pipeline of apprentices in training.
And lots of small projects means there are places where the risk is not so big of taking a chance on some innovation, or a university research collaboration, further keeping the pipeline full of students and innovations.
But, for it to work, you probably also need a high trust society. You need light touch regulation on the training, research funding, and project management. And all of that is easier at the 9 million person scale than at the 60 million person scale.
But in terms of trust: I think that's earned over time. Swiss people believe in decentralization of power, direct democracy and steady improvement, because it has proven to be stable. Inherently the Swiss are rather distrustful and cautious.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Build new cities, don't keep shuffling people into the existing ones. When you keep building new infrastructure to shuffle people into the same cities, the property values at the tail end of the infrastructure rise, pushing people further out, increasing the demand for new infrastructure.
The property prices inside the city stay inflated, wages stagnate, the working class loses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_towns_in_the_United_Kingdo...
If the UK had made a success of HS2 (difficult to imagine with governments in much of living memory, but let's sidestep all of that) then it could have been claimed, perhaps with some merit, that the UK was able to do something with rail infrastructure that the Swiss could never because they were hamstrung by their approach.
If the facts of the situation were reversed, of course we would draw the reverses conclusion. That golds true for just about any argument.
The UK's inability to build is apparent everywhere – our extreme lack of house building, our lack of modern nuclear power stations, our sewage system operating beyond its capacity, poor national transportation, etc. If HS2 was an exception to the rule then I doubt there would be this much focus on it. HS2 is just the most costly and extreme example of the problems we face when it comes to major infrastructure projects.
While I love swiss public transport, I wouldn't qualify it as fast. It's dense/frequent/reliable, but not so fast. If the core lines (e.g. St Gallen-Geneva and Basel-Lugano) where running >200km/h that would be fast.
One reason is that making those fast has a much bigger benefit for cross border travel (non swiss), while a lot of the investments are done to benefit e.g. commuters, but with the enshrined road Gotthard traffic limitation I think we'll need to make Alp crossing more attractive for cross border travels at some point (and hopefully do the same for the mittelland line, zurich to geneva in sub-2h should definitely be possible)
They work out what a good timetable looks like in that future. Then they build backwards from there.
A workback plan!
I love this. In the UK we're currently in the middle of a ~25-30 year rail upgrade programme and if you ask what the new timetables will look like (i.e. tangible benefits), they look at you as if you had 3 heads.
They're too busy blowing their own trumpet any time they complete a minor piece of work to answer such nonsense questions.
I used to live in North London, and it made me so sad that each branch-line I walked over on bridge, now allotments, or simply overgrown, could have taken me int the City far faster and more efficiently than the tube (I like the tube, as much as anyone can).
The UK can build things, but not if politicians are directly in charge, as they were in the Beeching cuts.
And your branch line wouldn't take you into the city - there isn't the terminal capacity.
However new lines, like the Victoria, Jubilee, and Crossrail will.
The ‘s’ in tranport stands for security.
There is nothing in the outlined strategy that would be made unworkable. You may reach a different value-engineered point, and it explicitly mentions cargo trains as well.
Coalitions are a thing in competitive democracies where you might need it to form a government.
The council members are also typically moderates and are selected in part based on their ability to work across the isle.
you seem to forget their famous mountains
Germany has the same problem. The railway can't plan much ahead as funding is always at the political whims of the next government, prestigious mega projects get funded while existing infrastructure crumbles - and now you have another mega-project to remediate existing infrastructure over the next years all at once, but for this they throw copious amounts of money at construction companies to ramp up that fast.
If there had been constant funding and maintenance, the network wouldn't be in such disarray in the first place and it would have come much cheaper than fixing it all at once in a short time frame.
In a bigger country, it is hard to maintain political cohesiveness over the long term. This means that big projects tend to get so large they can’t be terminated by the next round of government without major blowback. This leads to bloat and delay. The only way around this is total control (like China) but that leads to other issues.
The argument made in TFA isn't that the Swiss method works because of population size or GDP per capita, but because the processes and goals are completely different.
They work backwards from an agreed goal - written into law - that continuous improvement into infrastructure is a requirement of all governments, regardless of political bent. I actually don't think this is controversial, even in the UK, it's why there is now majority support for nationalisation of the railway operators (and water companies, and more) - it effectively forces capital expenditure rather than the decades of capital extraction we've suffered from.
Some of the Swiss projects are simpler because of geography (shorter distances), but some are harder (long tunnels through mountains). GDP per capita is an output, not an input - if we'd started doing this decades ago instead of believing the Regan/Thatcher nonsense we now know just doesn't work long-term, our GDP per capita would have benefited and it would unlikely be a 2x difference.
As a country the UK is so quick to dismiss initiatives from other countries that are shown to work there - from capital investment into infrastructure, to sovereign wealth funds, to encouraging retail investment into stock markets more (compare the US landscape to the UK landscape), to abolishing leaseholds - all because "that won't work here". Yet the data being cited - including by yourself - is not data. It's a hypothesis. Perhaps we should just give it a go, eh? Maybe for 10 years, let's try something different and see if any of it is better than the current baseline? Because it probably will be.
The UK thinks it is special, and in some ways it is, but it is also constantly shooting itself in the foot so that the Duke of Westminster and Duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall can keep making money, and so that the ghost of long-dead prime ministers with nothing to add of value to the 21st century can remain venerated by the political class.
We need to wake the hell up.
I found British culture so depressingly defeatist that I stopped trying to argue for improvements and ended up moving away.
Switzerland isn't perfect but for day to day life it's just much easier to live in. I believe that's partly being a higher trust society but also higher ambition to make infrastructure and town planning improvements.
(e.g. you know there's no point making some connection faster, because the lines still have to sync at 15m/30m/1h points. So you can focus on the places where you can go from a trip taking 40m to one taking 30m, because those are the one that will have a massive impact.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock-face_scheduling
(iirc that video covered it too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y9hGofgy9c )
> their population is 6X smaller and GDP per capita is twice as high
2x per capita * 1/6 the population = 1/3 the available money
Gotthard is longer than all the tunnels in HS2 combined. Total cost: CHF 9.560 billion as of December 2015 (it opened 1 June 2016), about £6.5bn at the exchange rate at the time.
As of 2020, the budget envelope set out by the DfT is £98 billion. HS2 is not fifteen times longer than GBT, it is (currently) four.
And why do you think that is?
Obviously each country has their own characteristics and solutions to any of their problems must be adapted. That does not mean, however, that there is nothing to learn from Switzerland just because the UK is larger. There are plenty of reproducible things that can be learn from Switzerland or any other country.
The approach outlined in the article, is also not applied generally to all infrastructure projects. It's specific to transport. It works because the process is sound and long-term oriented and not because Switzerland is small and rich. Perhaps your comment even inverts the causality.
A lot of people have spent a lot of time (accurately) pointing out how badly HS2 has gone and why. Very few people have pointed out a viable and concrete alternative.
You might think that saves a lot of money, until you drive around Zürich (think: M25), and realise that about 80% of your drive was through tunnels... and Zürich is not even mountaneous.
So, Zürich: you remember the tunnel that comes out half way to Adliswil, under Uetliberg?
What did it cost as a tunnel, what would that have cost as a surface road in reality, and what would it have cost as a surface road if the area had been flat? *That* is why you're being called out by loads of people for "a smaller geographic footprint".
Tunnels are expensive: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220621-what-if-roads-we...
As for call outs, who cares? Some people will find a reason to nag on any day that ends with a y.
Not to be rude, but have you considered that you may have causation backwards here.
I don't think that's relevant, as there are many small countries with the same problems as the UK and the UK is only medium-sized.
> and well-aligned.
That's the crux of the issue and it's not because of population size. Small countries are no more aligned than large ones (or medium size like the UK) in general.
Why is Switzerland more aligned politically than its peers? Why is social cohesion higher?